Conceptualizing Politics

particular goods is easier than about global ones.
Nonetheless, at least in principle, global/lethal challenges are incomparably 
more compelling than needs of global governance deriving from economic glo-
balisation and, since the 1960s, have produced more global governance than the 
latter: nuclear non-proliferation and deterrence regimes, unsatisfactory though they 
may be, are just one example as is the sheer fact that, after the Cuban missile crisis 
of 1962, nuclear states have carefully avoided coming into dead-end situations in 
which resorting to nuclear weapons could have been a real choice. The same holds 
for climate deals such as the Montreal Protocol of 1987 on the protection of the 
ozone layer, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015.
These tentative piecemeal answers to the requirements raised by global commons 
and future generations being now issues of politics make clear that Democracy Two 
or politics for post-modern times is not just a project, even less a utopia or a matter 
of hope, but something that is tentatively getting under way. How can we otherwise 
explain the tortuous process of climate negotiations, insufficient that their outcome 
may be? Democracy Two has not just normative, but explanatory value as well.
The same holds for another element of change. The notion of humanity has 
so far been evoked and put to work in philosophy, religion and literature; as such 
it had no status in politics and attempts at introducing it were fiercely rejected as 
a ‘zoological notion’ (cf. Spengler 1922). With global/lethal challenges things are 
changing: if all presently living and future men and women are subject to the same 
condition of potential victims of man-made lethal events, a link of necessity or 

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The globalised world  145
necessary cooperation arises among them if a shield has to be built. In philosophical 
terms, we recognise only a non-voluntary association with compulsory member-
ship as political; associations which everyone can get in to and out of at one’s own 
pleasure are not, because their decision making is not binding. With regards to the 
destiny of the global commons in which it lives, and only under this regard, human-
kind is now potentially such a non-voluntary, political association or community: 
living on the planet makes us all subject to the same lethal threats. Whether this 
potential unfolds and makes humankind actually capable of acting politically to the 
extent necessary to address global challenges remains to be seen. If this happens, it 
will create a pattern of robust and successful cooperation among states in the form 
of treaties and new institutions, but it will not introduce a world state by stealth. In 
this process regional associations may come to play a major role.
One corollary of the second definition of politics as it emerges in post-modern 
times still needs to be made explicit. It will not replace the classical definition, but 
coexist and collide with it. It is not a new step in the ‘foundation of a new politics’ 
or the rejuvenation of it occasionally announced by would-be prophets. As long 
as scarce and unequally distributed divisible goods will exist, there will be con-
flicts between parties over their distribution. In the process leading to more or less 
successful climate agreements (Montreal, Kyoto, Paris), we have already seen the 
interplay of the logic of global commons’ protection with the particularistic logic 
of parties in the struggle for the allocation of burdens; the latter has for long strides 
blocked or hampered the former, thus causing dangerous delays or a lower effec-
tiveness of the agreements. Understanding and managing this interplay, orienting it 
towards goals benefiting everyone, is now the puzzling new skill people interested 
in global politics will have to develop. It is perhaps less shining, but intellectually 
more interesting and politically more beneficial than waging great designs of ‘global 
justice’.